Let's head for March's scene of the crime -- or rather, scene of great excitement as I headed back to the Roundhouse Community Centre for free noontime figure drawing sessions in connection with the annual International Dance Festival.
I managed to take in one session a week during the Festival's three week run and was the first to arrive on Day One. In the small theatre where the sessions took place, the floor was strewn with massive woodprints and linoprints waiting to be hung.
And a sculptor was putting the finishing touches on his 12-foot high woven cedar sculpture.
I was elated when our first model arrived. A repeat from last year's sessions, she's a professional clown who can do *anything* -- even make and hold for five minutes the grimace that titles this post. We had a good chat before anyone else arrived, and she told me she was just back from an international clown conference in Patagonia. Who knew?
She's a fabulous model, who knows how to warm up a drawing session and hold poses of various lengths -- both of these are desirable skills.
Many of her poses showed her clown background:
And unbelievable, but true -- considering that she had moaned audibly to me that she would soon be 73 years old -- she even stood on her head.
The following week, I arrived to find that the lino- and woodprints had been hung. They'd been produced on a special oversized printing bed in Chinatown.
And the cedar weaving sculptor had contributed another fine piece.
That day's session featured a fine-featured young model who I came to think of as the Tormented Zombie Princess. She arrived in traditional mime's white face and a hooded flowing lacy gown which left only a few body parts visible: part of her face, her wrists and hands below the gown's long cuffs, and sometimes her legs below the knees. Not exactly promising terrain for a figure drawing session. (If those look like praying hands in the upper left, that's how I felt 15 minutes into the session: "Please let this end soon.")
To the accompaniment of new age-type music, she did an endless mime routine that was probably unique, amazing, and awesome for the right audience but just didn't work for this one. I was not the only one who found the painstakingly slow but continuous movement to be almost maddening. I first tried cheerfully to do a continuous line drawing, which is a typical art school exercise:--
And then I tried focusing on one body part as she moved -- here, legs...
...and then head and hands.
And finally, as the hour ended, I packed up my bags and escaped to take photos of the old structural elements of the Roundhouse lobby and a photo account of the Roundhouse history from its Heritage Gallery (which you can view here).
My third and final drawing session featured another young dancer as the model.
But she was fabulous. She worked from her own dance routine, but she intelligently selected poses to hold and warned us in advance how long she would hold them.
She did a terrific finale and when it was over, confessed to some of us that she'd never modelled before.
Thanks to her, my personal finale for this year's Roundhouse sessions ended on a happy note -- and I'll watch for this event again next March.
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